A vibrant, prosperous and instantly likeable city of 615,000 people, Memphis has been a music hub since Delta refugees began drifting through in the first decades of the twentieth century. With flattened thirds in major chords, these wanderers precipitated a great made-in-America discovery: fusing blues, gospel and country music creates rock & roll. Of all the musical genres threaded together by the Blues Highway, more meet in Memphis than anywhere else; it’s this rich union which gives the city its edge. Modern Memphis makes much of its musical past. After the lonely, beautiful Delta where blues is so often buried, Memphis is a welcome festival of great clubs, first-rate performers and cherished landmarks.
HISTORY
The earliest European settler to see the present site of Memphis was Spaniard Hermando DeSoto who passed through in 1541. But the high bluffs over the Mississippi would wait a further 198 years before the French erected a fort in 1739. The Spanish occupied the site from 1795 to 1797 at which point Americans took over, building Fort Adams to consolidate their territorial gain.
In 1819 a judge from Nashville led the development of a settlement here, naming it ‘Memphis’ after the ancient capital of Egypt. Memphis soon became a boisterous pioneer town where chancers and gamblers operated beyond the gaze of the law. Memphis fell to the North early in the Civil War, making it a natural base for war profiteers who smuggled contraband to both sides. The town’s fortunes continued to improve immediately after the war when vast shipments of cotton poured into Memphis to be shipped directly to Britain.
Under this layer of frantic commerce a problem festered; Memphis suffered from terrible sanitation which, during the long, hot summers, would make the town almost intolerable. In 1867, 1872 and 1878 that persistent problem was blamed for successive cholera and yellow fever epidemics which killed thousands and caused many thousands more to abandon the once-booming city. Memphis was declared bankrupt, its charter revoked.
African-Americans, who appeared largely resistant to yellow fever – perhaps thanks to natural immunity carried with them from Africa – set the pace in the subsequent drive to rebuild and repopulate the city. Labyrinthine drainage ditches were dug to improve the city’s sanitation.
Robert Church, a former slave, was a key figure in the rebirth of Memphis which was for some years pioneered by freedmen. Cotton continued to provide Memphis with wealth and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a burgeoning hardwood market contributed to the city’s fast-improving coffers.
Beale Street became the pulse of the African-American community in both culture and commerce. In 1908 when a young WC Handy settled on Beale Street, it was already a center for African-American music. For much of the century Beale Street would act as a magnet for musical talent and innovation. From the bluesmen Sam Phillips recorded before Elvis to Stax and its squadron of soul greats, Memphis would make a mighty contribution to American music.
Civil rights and urban renewal
The civil rights movement suffered its most painful blow in Memphis when on 4 April 1968 Dr Martin Luther King Jr stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel to address a crowd in support of striking sanitation workers. As he spoke an assassin took aim and killed him. The event led to shock, anger and violence in Memphis, America and the world.
In the seventies and eighties Beale Street and the black neighborhood around it fell into steep decline. Businesses moved out and developers looked to the area for profitable regeneration. Protests, campaigns and a concerted effort to respect the spirit of Beale Street forced the city to spend some $500 million restoring rather than rebuilding the area. The result is a Beale Street lined with bars and clubs which trumpet the musical history of the area. Some lament the commercial intrusion and feel for one-time residents who are now priced out of their own neighborhood. Many more are pleased to see blues history cherished and so many musicians employed.
HISTORY OF MUSIC IN MEMPHIS
Blues
When bandleader and composer WC Handy gravitated to Memphis in 1908, Beale Street was a lively strip of stores and bars and the heart of the black community. Although music was already a fixture on Beale Street, Handy was one of the first to bring blues to Memphis.
Handy was the first to publish a blues composition with flattened thirds and sevenths in the style he had heard in the Mississippi Delta. That composition, Memphis Blues, was originally titled Mr Crump, a campaign tune commissioned by mayoral candidate EH ‘Boss’ Crump. Crump was elected and Handy’s tune became a hit.
Labeled the ‘Father of the Blues’, Handy quickly followed up his success with such classic compositions as St Louis Blues and Beale Street Blues before moving to New York to set up his own music publishing business. His place in American musical history is assured.
Over the next few decades bluesmen poured into Memphis from the Delta; that mass northward migration of Southern blacks made Memphis, and more specifically Beale Street, a musical boomtown and a key arena in which bluesmen would cut their teeth. Memphis had established itself as a potent musical hub with influence far beyond Tennessee.
In the twenties Beale Street favored the lighter blues of ‘jug bands’ such as the Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. These groups played blues after a fashion but their style owed as much to the jocular music of minstrel shows as to Delta blues. Later Muddy Waters, Albert King, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Furry Lewis, Howlin’ Wolf and – perhaps most famously – BB King all found on Beale Street an education in the blues and a chance to project the music of the Delta to a wider audience.
Towards the end of the forties a young radio station employee, one Sam Phillips (interviewed on p147), resolved to record some of the blues he was hearing in Memphis. Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service and forged relationships with labels RPM and Chess. He recorded BB King, whom he sent to RPM, Howlin’ Wolf, Jackie Brenston, Ike Turner and others before creating his own label, Sun, in 1951.
Rock & roll
For Sun, Phillips continued to record blues artists but began looking for a ‘white man who could sing with the spontaneity of black artists’. The cold fact was that in fifties America, black music sold only to black audiences. It seemed that the blues had to be filtered through white lungs before it could reach a white audience. Sun would record a raft of white artists some of whom mixed blues, country and gospel to create something new – rock & roll.
Of the great names Sun recorded, Elvis Presley’s remains dominant. Presley was discovered by Phillips aged 18 and remained with the label for one year before Sun sold the rocketing star to RCA for just $35,000. Phillips maintains that his decision to sell Presley was a good one; that cash from RCA paid a lot of Sun’s debts. Other great rock & rollers to share the Sun rosta include legends Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.
Soul
Blues and rock & roll made Memphis one of the musical capitals of the world; the city’s blues and rock & roll heritage is truly extraordinary. But another genre, soul, also contributed a string of stars to Memphis’ already overloaded talent pool. In the sixties the Hi and Stax soul record labels opened for business in Memphis, harnessing the flair of a further throng of soon-to-be stars. Steve Cropper, Booker T & the MGs, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Al Green and Wilson Pickett (see p176) were all unleashed on the world through these labels.
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